A bit short on this one today. I can always tell when I won’t write anything good when the first few lines rhyme. Then, nothing.
Be a lifelong learner, that is it if you aren’t. I don’t assume you are on WordPress reading folks’ blogs. So, if anything keep up the good work, and enjoy the path.
I invite you to comment below, on your favorite way to learn. I wish I could read more, but I Podcast when I’m doing chores or driving.
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Skip?
I wish I had time to add things, a bit more exercise. Maybe a few more moments of calm with my family.
I am envious of the slow pace of life in the pre-industrial eras.
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In the interests of brevity, I’ll do my best to be short. Blogging encourages that as a format. Which I don’t mind.
A brief exchange I had with another writer, where he was quite critical of those who write for self-expression, closed the gap on my own considerations of writing. There is a quote I love attributed to Ernest Hemingway, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
On one hand, I believe that writing for the purposes of self-expression is incredibly selfish. It is the equivalent of saying, I have problems, here they are, and I expect you to dedicate your precious time to consuming them. Also, be nice to me. I believe that.
Conversely, Hemingway is right where by right. And an author can lay themselves down as a sacrifice to their community on a topic. Which is incredibly selfless.
How to thread the needle on that, and where is the final decision on that? Readers get to decide ultimately, once a work is released it how it is consumed by the world is not up to the author. It isn’t fully your work anymore.
This is where being conscious of that thin line between selfish self-expression and deliberately serving up a piece of one’s self for public consumption matters. I’ll use the idea of crafting diamonds, not for their rarity (See Debeers intentional supply control), or their beauty, because that doesn’t matter. But because of the way a diamond is cut, and how it reflects and refracts light. How it is different depending upon the angle it is viewed at.
Read any work, and the resulting criticism. How each era will inject itself into a piece and gain new relevance. Was John Milton a feminist? is one of my favorites. When a writer presents something personal and relevant, that can be respected for its substance enjoyed from its artisanship, those works become diamonds. Relevance to the greater public, either as a piece of historical social commentary, or something that always carries new weight. Diamonds are timeliness to as an addition to the metaphor. 1984 by George Orwell as a great example of a book that always feels relevant.
Many works carry far greater weight than the author intended, The Outsiders strikes me as a book greater than the author intended. Milton’s Paradise Lost, well, he was pretty arrogant, talented but arrogant. This is all to say that the intention of the author, the care which they manage their craft, and deep consideration for their reader all matter. And with a bit of luck, a culture or institution will align itself with a work and give it greater reach.
As a final note, I’m not arrogant enough to believe I craft diamonds. Most of what I do is blindly stumbling through writing.
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Ignore this prompt.
Go spend some time outside.
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I had originally went to the bookstore in search of Virgil’s Aeneid, or the Argonautica. Can’t say I was entirely surprised they weren’t on the shelf. I did stumble upon Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. I had Beowulf on the back-burner for a while as I’ve been working my way through the classics.
Pro-Tip if you want to get some sleep. Cicero’s On Duties, I get pretty drowsy about 3 page turns in. A Roman senator writing a letter to his son about how to be a good person, although thoughtful and informative is not a riveting read.
Beowulf, though. Has the unique distinction of showing the lifecycle of a hero. It allows him to grow old and die. He lived by hits wits and strength, and was a good member of his community, considering all the flaws of his age and the world he lived in through the modern lens, that live a good and honorable life was the question that drew me in.
In a summarized version of the story:
Beowulf answers the call of Hrothgar and kills the monster Grendel, with his bare hands.
Grendel’s mother gets angry, and Beowulf has to also battle her, but barely wins.
Beowulf returns home and honors his king, helps his community and becomes king himself.
Beowulf’s community is attacked by a dragon, he leads the charge, kills it and dies.
I left out some really great items but want to highlight a few things. Every time Beowulf defeats a monster, Grendel or the mother. He always honors the king, his host, and God. He is proud but not boastful. He is consequently honored for both is actions and his service.
As a leader, he gives graciously to his community, “Ring giver” is the term they use. I think it is truly a passing of rings as a form of wealth, but the point is he shares in his wealth and accomplishments. You can see how in a modern context, where wage gaps are a real issue, this can have a topical appeal.
Finally, as a leader, he led. When the dragon attacked, Beowulf in his later years was still a capable warrior, he didn’t get unnecessarily soft. And even when all his men fled, except one, he fought and killed the dragon in a battle that came down to a small dagger he kept on his boot.
As much as Beowulf is a heroic tale it is a story about how to act within a society. How to act with pride but not arrogance. And how a leader should function within a society. In a modern context we grow our claim by taking without giving because that is what the system and culture encourage. And where leaders are shown sitting down issuing orders, Beowulf has his hands dirty setting the example.
Also, the mead hall. We need more mead halls.
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When I grew up, my mother read pulpy romance, and my father read technical manuals. There was an apocryphal story within my family about him failing a grade and being called “Retarded” when that was an acceptable diagnosis for a teacher to make.
It was dyslexia. He was able to overcome that but reading remained a challenging topic, technical manuals held the power of simple and clear logic diagrams that could transcend his disability.
There was one exception to the rule, and that was The Adolescence of P-1. a charming book written in the 70’s about an accidental AI that goes rogue. Having had to pare down my always-growing library of books after moving repeatedly, P-1 always stays in my library.
Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s in a digitally competent home, I have been a curious follower of AI since I was a child. A computer my father built started on fire in my bedroom, I grew up with this stuff. The last year I’ve been following it even closer. I’m competent with Stable Diffusion, and Textual inversion. My cover work was done with prompts to pull out the characters I wanted to grace my cover. You can see some of them on my Wattpad page here. And I do this all with AI on my local machine, not a powerful piece of hardware but it does the job.
Now, I’ll start my real criticism to say that I believe AI will be a tool like all tools, to make us more of what we are. Expect more social media, fake news stories customized to your preference type to manipulate your opinion. More spam emails, text or whatever other path to try to trick you. That I anticipate. As if we don’t already experience a deluge of content garbage.
I don’t think it will replace people in a way that any other technology would not have.
I’ll also highlight, that human’s read other people’s writing. My own is a synthesis of my personal experiences mixed with the tools I’ve learned from reading other writers. I read a fair amount, and I try to read a diverse spread to improve my writing. That is why AI did, it didn’t lock it up in a database as we traditionally understand it. It build models to reference. And every word it writes is based upon an algorithm (albeit unknown) built upon the previous ones, in order to satisfy a prompt.
It is easy to go down the narrative that, this is what a human does, except for two key components. First is that the computer has no personal experience to draw from. The second is that words have a definitional meaning, but they are also symbolic representations. The most beautiful poetry and prose are extensions of these symbols. Which the readers can draw upon. It is why a book read in class may seem flat until we learn the story behind the story. The gaffer’s comment about potatoes, as an example from Lord of the Rings. It is a powerful, throw away comment. AI wouldn’t have the ability to make it, it has no experience and expresses no symbolism.
Expresses no symbolism, is how I’ll phrase that, because we, we humans will project our symbolism. That is a subtle but important difference and really why I believe it is fun, but definitely not going to take anything from the writers who wake up a bit groggy every day and need some coffee. There is magic in those wee hours that the servers in California can’t replicate.
That said, I’ll share two poems, light-hearted entries that Chat GPT wrote for my youngest. The first was a Homeric epic about how he takes big poops, he thought it was hilarious. The second was in the style of Shakespeare about a boy who stinks, which made him quite sad. These are all extensions of a theme where I call him Stinky face, a reference to Lisa McCourt, wonderfully written and Cyd Moore’s gorgeously illustrated I Love You, Stinky Face.
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I wrapped up The Exorcist, the novel.
There is an interesting dichotomy within where father Karras struggles with demons as a real entity. As much as within his own faith. No spoilers here, the film/book is fifty years old though.
It is something I struggled with also in O.P. #7, and that is. For an exorcism to work within the confines of the structure of the exorcism, God’s power must expel the demon. It isn’t a choice, it is an invocation from the truly faithful to expel. The exorcist combines their power of faith, and becomes a vessel for the power of God. Not metaphorical, this is big G God.
Being a logic diagram person, the demon’s existence, by virtue proves the existence of God, and the faith requirement only highlights that. It is not one side of the coin or the other, it is that one would not exist without the other. A demon’s purpose is to corrupt the realm of God, to corrupt the faithful and pull them further from God. Again demons need God, otherwise they don’t have anything to do.
This is why this idea of a demon being presented and a priest struggling with their faith is a logic fallacy. It strikes me more as a failure of faith in demons because if Father Karras believed in the demon, he would believe in God.
To a lesser degree, in my first draft, the characters, especially those with great faith struggle because the Jinn keep turning their food into worms. Unless they say an Islamic prayer over their food. The nuance is that those who don’t have a particularly strong faith, say the prayer as a gate to eat, and may eat. The character with the most faith, refuses. The open question, is the source of the power.
Are the Jinn expelled from the meal and it is not turned to worms, by the word of God?
Do the Jinn choose to respect the prayer and leave the food alone?
Is this a form of forced conversion and by saying the prayer, they have met their intent? I.E. no inherent power, only the power of the Jinn.
Is God language agnostic and does the language not matter? But by proxy, the Islamic God and the Christian God are the same…
Not going to answer that here. As an author, I struggle with some of those potential paths, which I’m obligated to choose from as I take the story further, and spend more time with the characters. I’ve put names and faces to the evil within O.P. #7, in the sequel. Part of this is I don’t want to take from the story, to distract with a theological debate or assertion where one may not belong.
Back to The Exorcist. I think that in the end, experiencing the demon Father Karras reignited his faith, but I do struggle with the inherent flaw of it all. The Demon’s attacks on the person are about their personal weakness of the body and of their faith in God. This may be the demon’s trick after all, where they need to have personal strength, that faith in God isn’t enough.
You are welcome to weigh in. This is discussion could get murky.
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I previously noted I was working my way through The Exorcist, the novel, in my posts We fantasize close to home and Forgiveness for a Story’s sins.
Before I lay my head down I closed up the book last night, I considered if there were parallels between Damien Karras the priest and The Omen’s Damien. More importantly I simmered on the surprise at how the bulk of the story lacked horror. It was surprisingly mundane and common. A detective story, with a rarely mentioned murder.
Rarely mentioned but always present, Regan’s Demon was always in the background. The horror of her actions only occupies about 10% of the word count of the story. The rest of the story is domestic and mundane, a mother struggles with a disobedient child after a divorce, a preacher with his faith and the death of his mother, and a detective tries to solve a murder.
In the background, a demon screams, curses, spews all manners of bile, and churches are desecrated. These quiet moments are where the reader catches their breath, wonder to the horror upstairs, and gets comfortable. It amplifies the moments of horror with Regan. Those slow steps up the stairs are heavier and more dreadful.
Not a particular fan of the horror genre myself, I dove into reading it to give myself a better set of tools to write my current series. With Father Merrin and Karras, reading in the dark. My own stories feel woefully inadequate. Not for lack of terror, I’m almost as vicious to my characters as Blatty is to his own. There is no stillness, no point to reflect on the horror. Bits of that are my own personality, If I have a room full of soldiers, and there is a monster, they are going to fight it. That doesn’t make good writing though, and I need to get back to work.
Final note, as I have some open questions:
Was Regan doing the desecrations in the church? She was locked up the whole time, or is that the hint she wasn’t?
Was Sharon bad? There was foreshadowing and I was anticipating trouble, but then nothing.
I mentioned in my last post We Fantasize Close to Home, that I was reading through The Exorcist. It has been keeping me up at night, in all the ways that an author wants to keep their reader up at night. I find the story engaging, well-written, and appropriately discomforting.
My thoughts/questions/concerns were on how the author was or was not, or for current authors how they are connected to their work. The book was written by a screenwriter and had its connections into the movies baked in. The movie was toned down by content but visually set standards that had never been seen on film before. Stories of people passing out in theaters are apocryphal at this point.
As I churn through the content, I’m amazed that it was received so well. It is brutal. But more confusing for me is that the story is so popular for its graphic and horrible scenes. I’m confident that execution matters.
The content is horrifying, the characters are abused in ways that I’m not going to communicate through a blog post. I know, having written graphic scenes that these scenes must be mulled over, planned, written, and rewritten. For the moments I spent reading it, there must have been hours that went into writing. These scenes were the creation of someone. Pulled from the air and with bravery penned down. It is supposed to be horrible, though, and it is not glorified but condemned and appropriately treated.
These items are horrible, they are done by the most horrible of evil entities. And by inferred comparison, if a person were to do these things, they would be on par with demons. There is a lot of creative license that can be attributed to an author who does that.
As an aside, the author, William Peter Blatty was a veteran who served in the Psychological Warfare division. To write in the way he did, the things he wrote, he had to know what he was doing to execute it properly.
Maybe it’s just my insecurity as I torture my own characters. Creations that I have grown fond of spending time with in my head.
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Dishes during the week is my podcast time. Weekend I have a lot of yard work to do and as a positive consequence, I can push through a lot of podcasts.
Recently as I’ve run through a lot of my literary podcasts, I’ve started to dive into more poetry. Prose has a focus on narrative, structure, and characters. There are deep traditions to draw from and a very deep well to plumb for inspiration.
It was while listening to Episode 8 of Professing Literature that I stumbled onto something.
It was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Which I’ll link below.
Two lines grabbed me:
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes”
This was a vivid personification of a natural force. At this time I’m working through the sequel to O.P. 7 and the poetic imagery here, where animus is applied to the movement of smoke and fog appealed to me. Considering I’m dealing with fire spirits who will torment characters’ dreams and manipulate the perception of someone’s environment. This has proven itself to be a spark to add to my own prose narratives.
Now, I’m confident that other writers have benefited from the blending of poetry and prose, complimentary as much as they are contradictory styles. For me dabbling has been positive.
I still don’t have any rhythm, that will slow me down from taking a real leap into poetry. But who knows where life will take us.
The link to “Prufrock” is from Poetry Foundation.
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Adam Fenner 